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O'Rourke, John

"With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines"

Come here," he said, earnestly; and we
ascended the road a little space. "Do you see all that country, sir?"
and he pointed towards the north and west of the town. "I do." "Well, it
was all belonging to farmers, and it was full of farmers' houses before
the famine; now you see there are only a couple of gentlemen's places on
the whole of it. The poor all died, and of course their houses were
thrown down." "And where were they all buried," I enquired. "Well, sir,"
he replied, "some of them were buried in the old chapel yard, near the
windmill; a power of them were buried in Abbeystrowry, just out there a
bit, where you are going to, but--" he suddenly added, as if correcting
himself--"sure they were buried everywhere--at the Workhouse over--in
the cabins where they died--everywhere; there was no way, you see, to
bring them all to Abbeystrowry, but still there were a power of them,
sure enough, brought to it."
My informant was quite right about my going to Abbeystrowry. I had
already enquired the way to it, and had learned that it was half-a-mile
or so beyond Bridgetown. I wished my interesting informant good evening,
and pursued my walk. Coming to the highest point of the road beyond
Bridgetown, a very charming landscape opened before me, made up of the
Valley of the Ilen and the agreeably undulating country beyond it.


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